Table Of ContentWalter Kohn − Personal Stories and Anecdotes
Told by Friends and Collaborators
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH
Matthias Scheffler Peter Weinberger (Eds.)
Walter Kohn
Personal Stories and Anecdotes
Told by Friends and Collaborators
With 59 Figures
1 3
Matthias Scheffler
Fritz-Haber-Institut
Faradayweg 4-6
14195 Berlin, Germany
e-mail:
On the Occasion of the
th
80 Birthday of Walter Kohn
Walter Kohn receiving his Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King, Stockholm,
December 1999 (⃝c 1999 The Nobel Foundation, photo: Hans Mehlin)
Preface
All of Walter Kohn’s personal friends readily agree that it is almost unthink-
able that he is turning 80 in March 2003. Considering all his activities –
from human rights to theoretical physics – it is indeed wonderful to see that
“age” has not changed his radiant lifestyle. He still seems to be one of the
most frequent flyers, whether to Cuba or, as his next destination, to India
and/or China, not counting his various annual transatlantic flights between
Santa Barbara and Europe. He has never stopped talking to people in the
same personal way, whether they are heads of state or graduate students. It is
probably his open, convincing smile that brushes away all possible obstacles
in communicating with fellow human beings . . .
Born in Vienna into a rather well-to-do Jewish family – his father and
his uncle ran a famous art-postcards shop – he grew up in the learned atmo-
sphere of an assimilated Jewish stratum that once carried to a large extent
the cultural outburst of fin-de-si`ecle Vienna. There was no question that he
would attend the “Akademisches Gymnasium”, not because it was close by –
in the same direction as the “Eislaufverein” (an ice-skating rink next to the
main concert hall), where he often went on briskly cold winter afternoons –
but because it was simply considered to be “the” best.
Although Austria was ruled at that time by a clerico-fascist regime whose
political antisemitism created a cultural atmosphere in its image, dramatic
changes in Walters’s life only took place after the Nazi occupation in 1938.
He was forced out of his beloved gymnasium and eventually was transferred to
the (Jewish) Chajes-Gymnasium, where the number of students diminished on
a da liy basis. There, he also met two outstanding teachers who intellectually
stimulated him for the rest of his life.
Fortunately he escaped to England on one of the last “Kindertransporte”
(“children transports”) – a 16-year-old boy transplanted into a foreign country
who had left behind his parents. In England he was put up as an apprentice
in horticulture and was later deported as “enemy alien” to Canada, where he
worked as a lumberjack. But the learned atmosphere could not be banished
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Preface
Walter Kohn, Thanksgiving in Santa Barbara, 2002 (photo: M. Scheffler)
even within the fenced-in camps: an ad hoc school took care of the semi-adult
kids that Hitler Germany had uprooted.
Eventually he managed to be accepted at Toronto University. His first pub-
lication was written in the same spirit as his former teachers’ at the Chajes
Gymnasium in Vienna and dealt with contour integrations, a mathematical
technique he still loves. If there was anything he rescued from the old conti-
nent, from his parents’ home, something he always carried along in his mind,
then surely enough it was this learned atmosphere, intellectual enlightenment
and the feeling that curiosity-driven science leads to new perceptions.
This is not the place to cite or even comment on his by-now-famous papers
– on the “Kohn anomalies”, just one example of his various contributions to
modern solid state theory, or on what is now well-known as “Density Func-
tional Theory”, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1998.
Here the focus is on Walter’s personal contacts – with colleagues, collabora-
tors, friends – which were always intense, and not only with those who ended
up co-authoring works with him. Some of his scientific friendships, with Lut-
tinger or Friedel, for example, were a permanent source of new ideas. Looking
back it has to be noted that – very typically for Walter – none of his friends
in physics were narrow-minded scientists; all of them also had broad “other”
interests.
Walter’s other interests are a most rewarding aspect of meeting him, be-
sides, of course, the notoriously sizzling discussions about certain aspects of
theoretical solid state physics. It is a real pleasure to go with hi m t on a
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Preface
Mara Vishniac Kohn, summer 2002 in Berlin (photo: M. Scheffler)
exhibition, a gallery, to talk about fictional literature; his enthusiasm for the
exceptionally new, for the yet-unknown old, seems to be unlimited. His enthu-
siasm extends from certain styles of Greek vases, discovered during a scientific
trip to Crete, to drawings by Egon Schiele to be seen at a special exhibition
in the capital of an Austrian province.
One cannot write about Walter without also writing about Mara, his wife,
perhaps the only fixed point in the space of his vibrant activities. Mara and the
house in Santa Barbara – which contains an incredible collection of precious
old books and the archives of her father, Roman Vishniac, many of whose
famous photographs hang on the walls – constitute the Kohn’s home. The
house, with its staggering view of the coastline – sometimes the Channel
Islands seem to pop up only few miles away – seems an appropriate resting
place for Walter before he goes off again, touring the world in matters of
science or human relations. Mara and her soft, quiet voice – a friendly but
decisive “Walterchen” has the ability to momentarily cut the thread of his
fascinating stories about people he met or one ought to meet – occasionally
give the urgently needed reminder that even a Walter Kohn needs moments
of creative quietness.
Quite a few stories collected in this book give account of the circumstances
of working with Walter, of being a collaborator of his, of being accepted as a
friend of the Kohns. There is no doubt that these stories also cover a certain
chapter in the history of science in a very personal manner: a kind of “oral
history” of modern theoretical physics. Besides physics, besides stories about
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physics, however, they all speak to Walter Kohn’s enduring humanity – if only
by recalling his infectious, giggling laugh, which he must have saved from his
early childhood.
Berlin, Vienna, Matthias Scheffler
January 2003 Peter Weinberger
About the Editors
Matthias Scheffler is director of the Theory Department of the Fritz-Haber-
Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and professor at the Technical University and
at the Free University Berlin. His research concerns condensed-matter theory, ma-
terials, and the chemical physics of surfaces. His current interests include devel-
oping first-principles methods (using density-functional theory) for molecular sim-
ulations that bridge the time and length scales from those of the atomistic pro-
cesses to those that determine the properties of realistic systems. Contact: Fritz-
Haber-Institut, Faradayweg 4-6, D-14195 Berlin-Dahlem, Germany; scheffl
